AN Egyptian child lived for nearly two years with half a ballpoint pen stuck in his brain after it entered through an eye, the Egyptian press reported this week. Ibrahim Farahat, now 10, fell down two years ago, and a ballpoint pen went into his eye, causing him to faint for a minute, his mother told the government newspaper al-Ahram. “I saw the pen sticking out of his eye, as blood was gushing. I pulled half of it out, believing I had removed the whole object,” she said. He was taken to a country hospital in the Mansura region in the north of Egypt, where doctors said X-rays showed there was no foreign body left. Six months after the incident, the child started to get fevers, and was operated on three times, with the surgeons saying each time they have removed a cist. As the child began to squint and have spells of interminable chattering, his farmer father did the rounds of doctors, using up his savings, he told the paper. A new operation in May resulted in the rest of the pen being removed from the child’s brain. – AFP